UPDATE Yes, Indycar lost another team. Why? Because they lost their buy-a-ride driver(s) of course. Well, they lost that driver too because they made a bad engine choice last year. But suffice to say, that you don't see Ganassi Andretti or Penske shutting down.
As long as there is a dominant culture of buy-a-rides in our sport, it will be handicapped. The sport has to find a way to allow ANY talent to ascend, based on the merit of the talent.
The buy-a-ride culture also makes the sport much more susceptible to economic changes, especially abroad, since most drivers come from outside the USA in the pro and semi-pro open wheeled ranks. It seems like it tends to lag a year or two behind the general economy or so.
I said this was a weakness to Indy Lights years back. I said it right to Roger Bailey. Two years later, the series was dead. It got resurrected through voodoo economics of Tony George, but what I said would happen, happened.
It also happened with CART, and Champ Car, and Atlantics. I said the same thing to all of them.
The sustainable future of the sport is to grow it in a way that allows for a proper business model on par with any other professional sport. It was sustainable until Tony George split the sport and destroyed it. Destroyed it.
Lance Freespeed
11/01/12 It appears IndyCar has lost another team. The series has lost many teams over the years, Conquest never retuned this year and the latest appears to be HVM.
The team will enter the FIA's World Endurance Championship in 2013, team owner Keith Wiggins told Autoweek on Thursday.
"That's certainly a stable series and growing," he said.
Wiggins said HVM also is exploring a parallel American Le Mans Series Prototype Challenge entry.
Wiggins said the IndyCar program is on hold, pending a resolution of the contract with the failed Lotus engine program. Wiggins said IndyCar officials also haven't shown him how HVM can get a Chevrolet or a Honda engine for next season.
That delay in decision-making has contributed to Wiggins' driver of the past three seasons, Simona de Silvestro, and her sponsor, Nuclear Clean Energy, moving to KV Racing Technology's IndyCar team as a partner to driver Tony Kanaan's program. De Silvestro's primary backer, Imran Safiulla, has become a KV co-owner alongside Kevin Kalkhoven and Jimmy Vasser.
Wiggins declined to discuss how that association came to be, but he once talked about an HVM-KV partnership. AutoWeek
[Editor's Note: So HVM has lost their driver, their engine, their sponsor, and their driver's big backer is now a co-owner of KV Racing. Don't hold your breath that you will see them back in IndyCar anytime soon.]
